The hunter blasts the duck out of the sky. The retriever leaps into the water to fetch the corpse.

Now: the hunter is a predator, descended from vegetarians. The retriever is a domesticated re-breed. Its ancestors were carnivores. Its ancestors would have eaten the duck had they been able to kill it. Now the dog is a servant: it fetches the master’s kill for the master.
(Of course some carvivores kill just to keep in practice: they don’t necessarily eat the kill. The universe, innanimate and living, is more complex than we can track.)

Falconers train falcons, a fell predator if there ever was one, to kill but not eat: until the master feeds it. The kill is for the master, not for the killer. The falcon had been its own killer; now its a surrogate killer.

Once upon a time the expanding kleptocracy sent soldiers into the target territory. The soldiers killed, raped, pillaged for themselves … until the alpha kleptocrats put them back on a leash, taking the conquered territory for themselves. Nowadays the poor soldiers don’t even get to rape and pillage: at least not quite so freely: they know in advance that they’re killing for the alphas: the bureaucrats step right in: and rule.

If you think about it, civilized man uses lots and lots of dummy surrogates. And there’s still more that could be exploited. If a falcon can be trained to kill but not eat (till fed), surely some fisherman could figure a way to put a tourniquet around an anhinga’s stomach, tether its foot, and send it into the drink for the fisherman’s fish dinner. (or the fisherman’s merch, for the fisherman to put on the market: or the fisherman’s alpha-owner’s merch … “On the market” is the point.)

But have you thought about this one? God.

Theists say that God created heaven and earth. They say that he did it some fourteen billion years after the universe had already come into being, some four point six billion years after this solar system had formed, some couple of million years after humans were walking upright, some seventy-four or thereabouts thousand years after man had wandered out of Africa.

If existence was created, then we might as well call the creator “god”: might as well name it something: and why not name it the word men have used for the biggest magical entity they can think of? But by the time “G”od became capitalized, he was a dummy surrogate: one designed by his creators to say that the land the Canaanites had taken over from the birds, the worms, the spiders, the insects, the trees … to grow wheat, to build houses … actually belonged to the Jews: who’d never yet set foot on it. [note]

This God then had a son who gave the Jews’ God to the Gentiles: so the Gentiles could say that their God had given the Mohawk land to the British, the Soandso’s land to the French, the Somebody-else’s land to the Russians, the Dutch … the Miccosukee beachfronts to JP Morgan …

Miccosukee
thanx turtletrack

No matter what disgusting and immoral things we want to do, we can always backdate God’s approval: tell everyone he told us to do it. [note]

Whatever we do may be legal: we write the laws. But what God told me to tell you is that you’re disgusting, degraded, immoral.

The human species may be — just MAY be — viable; but not civilized man, not kleptocratic man: the Was’i Chu, gringos, Yankees … white men.

I don’t care what hue your skin has: if you take, and destroy, and keep on taking, you’re a white man. (And if you don’t, you’re not.)

(When God breathed convictions into me, I always thought it was God, for decades. Now I think that actually it was god: or truth: or nature: or evolution: viability. For the human world, Ivan Illich called it conviviality.)

Notes

God Told Us:
I talked above about humans exploiting other species as well as our own in our predations but I’d meant to work in another kind of apparatus of deception before bringing God into the analogy: not the first time I’ve left out a key metaphor in the actual rush of composition. But I’ll have to rewrite the whole to work it in properly. So meantime I’ll park it here:

Somebody bumps you in a crowd; a moment later you realize that your wallet has left your pocket. You grab the guy who bumped you: he doesn’t have it! He did the bumping — his partner did the pocket-picking. You’ve been teamed.

Gangs of New York showed us a related apparatus: The pretty gal (Cameron Diaz) sits on the bus: her left hand in her lap, her poor right arm helpless in a sling. That’s the dummy hand. Her real right hand is going through your watch pocket.

We use God in lots of ways. A few Christians let God tell them to turn the other cheek; but the team of Christians use God as a misdirection: like the false arm in the real sling. People spouting morality are the dummy arm; the real arm is out grabbing.

The dummy Congress shows all these wonderful concerns; the real Congress is doing the real work of the kleptocracy: stealing everything it can.

And it has more fingers than millipedes have legs.

Canaan:

Don’t forget that the Jews and the Canaanites were related. (Whoops: now I hear that the Canaanites were the Jews’ name for the Phoenicians! Far less related: related the way all humans are related, but not much closer than that.) That’s why the Jews, however much they wanted the land, didn’t want to just slaughter the Canaanites. Both peoples spoke a Semitic language.

That’s been long understood; this is new: Semitic language, Semitic this and that, originated in north Africa, not in the Middle East! No one is suggesting that the Canaanites and Jews actually came from Africa, not the Middle East; but their language did: the ancestor culture.

How’d that happen? We don’t know. Anyone may guess. But it’s not uncommon: don’t American “blacks” speak English? Is anyone saying that they’re from England, not Africa?